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Boiled Onions with Cream
Peel twelve medium-sized onions, pare the roots without cutting them, place in a saucepan, cover with salted water, add a bunch of parsley, and boil for forty-five minutes. Take them from the saucepan, place them on a dish, cover with two gills of cream sauce mixed with two tablespoonfuls of the broth the onions were cooked in, garnish, and serve.
A plain vegetable side from the Waldorf's kitchen, written in the shorthand of a professional cook who assumed you had cream sauce standing by. Two details need translating: the measure and the sauce.
- Two gills of cream sauceA gill is a quarter-pint, so two gills is one cup. In period usage 'cream sauce' generally denotes a white sauce rather than plain cream; a roux of 2 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp flour cooked with 1 cup milk, or half milk and half cream, is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- Pare the roots without cutting themThis is the hinge. Trim the hairy root plate flush but leave the basal disc intact, or the layers separate and the onions collapse into shreds during the long boil.
- Forty-five minutesNot a misprint for a whole medium onion, but on the long side. Test at 30 minutes with a skewer through the equator: it should meet no resistance but the onion should still hold its shape. Yellow onions of about 2½ inches usually land at 30-40 minutes.
- The bunch of parsleyA cooking bundle, tied with string and lifted out, not a garnish. Stems carry more flavour than leaves here; save the leaves for the finish.
- Two tablespoonfuls of the brothThinning the sauce with the onion water is what keeps this from tasting like flour paste. Add it off the heat and taste before salting further, since the cooking water was salted.
- GarnishLeft unspecified because it was the cook's discretion. Chopped parsley, paprika or a dusting of nutmeg are all consistent with the period.
- YieldTwelve onions serves six generously as a side, four if it is standing in for a vegetable course.
Boiled onions in cream sauce were long a fixture of American hotel and holiday tables, and they survive today mostly as the creamed onions that appear beside Thanksgiving turkey. The dish is really a French white-sauce technique applied to a cheap and universally available vegetable, which is why it turns up in a book by Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's long-serving maître d'hôtel, whose 1896 Cook Book mixed grand-hotel cookery with entirely ordinary household fare. Its presence here is a reminder that a hotel kitchen of the 1890s spent as much of its day on onions and cream sauce as on terrapin and canvasback duck; the sauce was familiar enough that Oscar can call for two gills of it without explaining where it comes from.